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‘it would be one thing if it was draconian and it worked,” says “The Wire” creator David Simon of America’s war on drugs. “But it’s draconian, and it doesn’t work.” That sums up the point of Eugene Jarecki’s documentary: Our drug laws do irreparable harm while barely denting the problem.

Through interviews and contemporary and archival footage, Jarecki builds his case. Mandatory sentencing results in an unprecedented level of incarceration, tearing apart families and communities. Nonviolent offenders emerge unemployable and go straight back to jail. And yet the system continues because it’s politically expedient and financially beneficial to everyone from the prison industry to law enforcement itself.

Jarecki begins by describing his own Jewish family’s experience of oppression and his consequent commitment to justice, and his indignation leads him to an uncomfortably excessive Holocaust analogy. Even so, the evidence Jarecki amasses against the drug wars in “The House I Live In” is more than strong enough to withstand any excess rhetorical zeal.